In case using Z4Root app to boot Android doesn't work with your Motorola Defy, albeit report says the one-click root app is able to root Motorola Defy painlessly. Then you can take the manual way for the same purpose.

So here is the tutorial from Forum XDA Developers you can use to root Motorola Defy, it's requiring several steps thus make sure you follow each of them carefully to get the job done accordingly, so let's begin!

5. Now after that last command you should be back to your normal console, not the phone one, so we need to connect to it again, and doing so we should now see that we have root permissions since the "#" symbol is displayed instead of "$".

Code:

adb shell

6. Now we mount the /system partition as writable and copy the necessary files there, and set them with the right permissions: